All entries for March 2011

March 06, 2011

In the early hours of Sunday morning while I was attempting to finish the Weibull curve fitting section of my assignment, I stumbled upon "The wind turbine recipe book". It immediately struck me as something I wanted to do - build my very own wind turbine. I'm hardly expecting the megawatts here but I think it will be a very useful exercise to carry out in the summer after graduation and before I fit into a job (most likely in September). Would I be able to build my own micro-generator and how much would it cost me (time and money) to do so? I want to find out, so this is on the agenda now!

It looks like it's been written by a guy who is a bit of an enthusiast. Whilst it might not be the most neat of websites or appearances, I'd stick with "never judge a book by it's cover". I think I can get a lot from this, and building a wind turbine will be a huge benefit to my knowledge for a future career.

What will I power with it though? That's the next question. I don't really see myself trying to get it on the Feed In Tariff. As this will be quite small scale (probably about 2kW...?) I might aim to charge a set of batteries or something. Then I could use that power as and when needed for any number of interesting purposes. The example that comes to mind is the pedal powered sound system at the University of Warwick's go green week. Anyway we'll see about that. By the time summer rolls round, if I have the time and resource to do this I might just dedicate a whole blog to it.